This week, both YouTube and Vimeo opened up beta offerings using HTML5 video instead of Flash to bring video content to users. Both of them chose to use the h264 codec, which meant that only Safari and Chrome can play these videos, since firefox doesn't license the h264 codec. Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, explained on his blog why Mozilla doesn't license the h264 codec.

- h264 currently require a very expensive license to distribute an encoder/decoder in the USA (other countries?)
- h264 will also require paying to stream content in 2011 (so you pay: for encoding, for decoding, and for the content. triple rip-off ftw)
- h264 patent expires in 2017 (by then, h264 will be obsolete)
- google bought on2 (VP8) probably to pro-actively destroy h265's (the thing after h264) competitor
- theora produce more or less similar stuff as h264 but isnt backed-up by companies since they have no interest into it
- theora lacks hardware acceleration
- using h264 ensure some vendor lock in: you can't setup a youtube competitor without zillion of dollars, firefox can't survive, etc. ultimately, the consumer (US) lose